فصل 49

Chapter 49

THE STACKS of paper and files and diskettes in Starling’s cubicle reached critical mass. Her request for more space went unanswered. Enough. With the recklessness of the damned she commandeered a spacious room in the basement at Quantico.

The room was supposed to become Behavioral Science’s private darkroom as soon as Congress appropriated some money. It had no windows, but plenty of shelves and, being built for a darkroom, it had double blackout curtains instead of a door.

Some anonymous office neighbor printed a sign in Gothic letters that read HANNIBAL’S HOUSE and pinned it on her curtained entrance. Fearful of losing the room, Starling moved the sign inside.

Almost at once she found a trove of useful personal material at the Columbia College of Criminal Justice Library, where they maintained a Hannibal Lecter Room.

The college had original papers from his medical and psychiatric practices and transcripts of his trial and the civil actions against him. On her first visit to the library Starling waited forty-five minutes while custodians hunted for the keys to the Lecter room without success. On the second occasion, she found an indifferent graduate student in charge, and the material uncatalogued.

Starling’s patience was not improving in her fourth decade. With Section Chief Jack Crawford backing her at the U.S. Attorney’s office, she got a court order to move the entire college collection to her basement room at Quantico. Federal marshals accomplished the move in a single van.

The court order created waves, as she feared it would. Eventually, the waves brought Krendler .

At the end of along two weeks, Starling had most of the library material organized in her makeshift Lecter center. Late on a Friday afternoon she washed her face and hands of the bookdust and grime, turned down the lights and sat on the floor in the corner, looking at the many shelf-feet of books and papers. It is possible that she nodded off for a moment .

A smell awakened her, and she was aware that she was not alone. It was the smell of shoe polish.

The room was semi-dark, and Deputy Assistant Inspector General Paul Krendler moved along the shelves slowly, peering at the books and pictures. He hadn’t bothered to knock - there was no place to knock on the curtains and Krendler was not inclined to knocking anyway, especially at subordinate agencies. Here, in this basement at Quantico, he was definitely slumming.

One wall of the room was devoted to Dr Lecter in Italy, with a large photograph posted of Rinaldo Pazzi hanging with his bowels out from the window at Palazzo Vecchio. The opposite wall was concerned with crimes in the United States and was dominated by a police photograph of the bow hunter Dr Lecter had killed years ago.

The body was hanging on a peg board and bore all the wounds of the medieval Wound Man illustrations. Many case files were stacked on the shelves along with civil records of wrongful death lawsuits filed against Dr Lecter by families of the victims.

Dr Lecter’s personal books from his medical practice were here in an order identical to their arrangement in his old psychiatric office. Starling had arranged them by examining police photos of the office with a magnifying glass. Much of the light in the dim room came through an X-ray of the doctor’s head and neck which glowed on a light box on the wall. The other light came from a. computer workstation at a corner desk. The screen theme was “Dangerous Creatures.”

Now and then the computer growled.

Piled beside the machine were the results of Starling’s gleaning. The painfully gathered scraps of paper receipts, itemized bills that revealed how Dr Lecter had lived his private life in Italy, and in America before he was sent to the asylum. It was a makeshift catalog of his tastes.

Using a flatbed scanner for a table, Starling had laid I a single place setting that survived from his home in Baltimore-china, silver, crystal, napery radiant white, a candlestick-four square feet of elegance against the grotesque hangings of the room.

Krendler picked up the large wineglass and pinged it with his fingernail.

Krendler had never felt the flesh of a criminal, never fought one on the ground, and he thought of Dr Lecter as a sort of media bogeyman and an opportunity. He could see his own photograph in association with a display like this in the FBI museum once Lecter was dead. He could see its enormous campaign value. Krendler had his nose close to the X-ray profile of the doctor’s capacious skull, and when Starling spoke to him, he jumped enough to smudge the X-ray with nose grease.

“Can I help you, Mr. Krendler?”

“Why’re you sitting there in the dark?”

“I’m thinking, Mr. Krendler.”

“People on the Hill want to know what we’re doing about Lecter. “

“This is what we’re doing.”

“Brief me, Starling. Bring me up to speed.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer Mr. Crawford-“

“Where is Crawford?”

“Mr. Crawford’s in court.”

“I think he’s losing it, do you ever feel that way?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“What are you doing here? We got a beef from the college when you seized all this stuff out of their library. It could have been handled better.”

“We’ve gathered everything we can find regarding Dr Lecter here in this place, both objects and records. His weapons are in Firearms and Toolmarks, but we have duplicates. We have what’s left of his personal papers.”

“What’s the point? You catching a crook, or writing a book?” Krendler paused to store this catchy rhyme in his verbal magazine. “If, say, a ranking Republican on judiciary Oversight should ask me what you, Special Agent Starling, are doing to catch Hannibal Lecter, what could I tell him?”

Starling turned on all the lights. She could see that Krendler was still buying expensive suits while saving money on his shirts and ties. The knobs of his hairy wrists poked out of his cuffs.

Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself. She made herself see Krendler as a police academy class.

“We know Dr Lecter has very good ID,” she began.

“He must have at least one extra solid identity, maybe more. He’s careful that way. He won’t make a dumb mistake.”

“Get to it.”

“He’s a man of very cultivated tastes, some of them exotic tastes, in food, in wine, music. If he comes here he’ll want those things. He’ll have to get them. He won’t deny himself.

“Mr. Crawford and I went over the receipts and papers left from Dr Lecter’s life in Baltimore before he was first arrested, and what receipts the Italian police were able to furnish, lawsuits from creditors after his arrest. We made a list of some things he likes. You can see here. In the month that Dr Lecter served the flautist Benjamin Raspail’s sweetbreads to other members of the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra board, he bought two cases of Chateau Petrus Bordeaux at thirty-six hundred dollars a case. He bought five cases of Batard-Montrachet at eleven hundred dollars a case, and a variety of lesser wines.”

“He ordered the same wine from room service in St Louis after he escaped, and he ordered it from Vera dal 1926 in Florence. This stuff is pretty rarified. We’re checking importers and dealers for case sales.”

“From the Iron Gate in New York, he ordered Grade A foie gras at two hundred dollars a kilo, and through the Grand Central Oyster Bar he got green oysters from the Gironde. The meal for the Philharmonic board began with these oysters, followed by sweet-breads, a sorbet, and then, you can read here in Town & Country what they had” - she read aloud quickly - “a notable dark and glossy ragout, the constituents never determined, on saffron rice. Its taste was darkly thrilling with great bass tones that only the vast and careful reduction of the fond can give. No victim’s ever been identified as being in the ragout. Da da, it goes on - here it describes his distinctive tableware and stuff in detail. We’re cross-checking credit card purchases at the china and crystal suppliers.”

Krendler snorted through his nose.

“See, here in this civil suit, he still owes for a Steuben chandelier, and Galeazzo Motor Company of Baltimore sued to get back his Bentley. We’re tracking sales of Bentleys, new and used. There aren’t that many. And the sales of supercharged Jaguars. We’ve faxed the restaurant game suppliers asking about purchases of wild boar and we’ll do a bulletin the week before the redlegged partridges come in from Scotland.”

She pecked at her keyboard and consulted a list, then stepped away from the machine when she felt Krendler’s breath too close behind her.

“I’ve put in for funds to buy cooperation from some of the premier scalpers of cultural tickets, the culture vultures, in New York and San Francisco - there are a couple of orchestras and string quartets he particularly likes, he favors the six or seventh row and always sits on the aisle. I’ve distributed the best likenesses we have to Lincoln Center and Kennedy Center, and most of the philharmonic halls. Maybe you could help us with that out of the DOJ budget, Mr. Krendler.”

When he didn’t reply, she went on. “We’re cross-checking new subscriptions to some cultural journals he’s subscribed to in the past-anthropology, linguistics, Physical Review, mathematics, music.”

“Does he hire S and M whores, that kind of thing? Male prostitutes?”

Starling could feel Krendler’s relish in the question. “Not to our knowledge, Mr.

Krendler. He was seen at concerts in Baltimore years ago with several attractive women, a couple of them were prominent in Baltimore charity work and stuff. We have their birthdays flagged for gift purchases. None of them was ever harmed to our knowledge, and none has ever agreed to speak about him. We don’t know anything about his sexual preferences.”

“I’ve always figured he was a homosexual.”

“Why would you say that, Mr. Krendler?”

“All this artsy-fartsy stuff. Chamber music and tea-party food. I don’t mean anything personal, if you’ve got a lot of sympathy for those people, or friends like that. The main thing, what I’m impressing on you, Starling: I better see cooperation here. There are no little fiefdoms. I want to be copied on every 302, I want every time card, I want every lead. Do you understand me, Starling?”

“Yes, sir.”

At the door he said, “Be sure you do. You might have a chance to improve your situation here. Your so-called career could use all the help it can get.”

The future darkroom was already equipped with vent fans. Looking him in the face, Starling flipped them on, sucking out the smell of his aftershave and his shoe polish. Krendler pushed through the blackout curtains without saying good-bye.

The air danced in front of Starling like heat shimmer on the gunnery range.

In the hall Krendler heard Starling’s voice behind him.

“I’ll walk outside with you, Mr. Krendler.”

Krendler had a car and driver waiting. He was still at the level of executive transport where he made do with a Mercury Grand Marquis sedan.

Before he could get to his car, out in the clear air, she said, “Hold it, Mr.

Krendler.”

Krendler turned to her, wondering. Might be a glimmer of something here. Angry surrender? His antenna went up.

“We’re here in the great out-of-doors,” Starling said. “No listening devices around, unless you’re wearing one.”

An urge hit her that she could not resist. To work with the dusty books she was wearing a loose denim shirt over a snug tank top.

Shouldn’t do this. Fuck it.

She popped the snaps on her shirt and pulled it open. “See, I’m not wearing a wire.”

She wasn’t wearing a bra either. “This is maybe the only time we’ll ever talk in private, and I want to ask you. For years I’ve been doing the job and every time you could you’ve stuck the knife in me. What is it with you, Mr. Krendler?”

“You’re welcome to come talk about it . I’ll make time for you, if you want to review .”

“We’re talking about it now.”

“You figure it out, Starling.”

“Is it because I wouldn’t see you on the side? Was it when I told you to go home to your wife?”

He looked at her again. She really wasn’t wearing a wire.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Starling . this town is full of cornpone country pussy.”

He got in beside his driver and tapped on the dash, and the big car moved away.

His lips moved, as he wished he had framed it: “Cornpone cunts like you.”

There was a lot of political speaking in Krendler’s future, he believed, and he wanted to sharpen his ‘verbal karate’, and get the knack of the sound bite.